The whistleblower behind a recent series of bombshell revelations on Facebook’s effects on teenage girls’ mental health, its use by drug cartels and human traffickers, and its special rules for VIPs revealed herself to the world on Sunday.
The whistleblower is Frances Haugen, 37, a former product manager at Facebook who came to the company to help protect against election interference on the platform. She said she became disillusioned with the tech company’s motives and felt she had to do something about the ways it was often knowingly harming users.
Haugen resigned from Facebook in May, but before doing so, she dug into and saved copies of multiple internal company documents that exposed an array of deep-rooted problems within the social media company. She gave these to the Wall Street Journal, which used them for its Facebook Files series, which has thrown the company into a crisis in the past month.
“There were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook. And Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” Haugen said in an interview with 60 Minutes.
Haugan specializes in algorithmic product management and worked on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp before arriving at Facebook. She studied electrical and computer engineering at Olin College and got an MBA from Harvard.
She was recruited to Facebook to be the lead product manager on the civic misinformation team, which dealt with issues related to democracy and misinformation, and later also worked on counterespionage.
Facebook disbanded the civic integrity team in 2020 after the presidential election, which was a major factor in Haugan’s sense that the company was not acting in good faith.
“When they got rid of civic integrity, it was the moment where I was like, ‘I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous,’” she said during the television interview.
Haugen’s lawyers have also filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, charging that the company misled investors. The complaints compare Haugen’s internal company documents with Facebook’s public statements to find wrongdoing, according to 60 Minutes. The SEC has not commented on Haugen’s finding or whether it plans to take action against Facebook.
Facebook has disputed Haugen’s assertions regarding the company’s behavior and the Wall Street Journal’s reporting.
“Every day our teams have to balance protecting the ability of billions of people to express themselves openly with the need to keep our platform a safe and positive place. … To suggest we encourage bad content and do nothing is just not true,” Facebook spokeswoman Lena Pietsch said in a statement.
